star

Starts with a bang reader Dumb Ass Dave points us to this BBC article about the discovery of a planet that's only just forming around a new star. The planet is surely less than 100,000 years old, although the 1,600 year old figure quoted in the article is probably hogwash. How do you find it? Take a look at this picture below, taken in radio waves: That big blurry thing in the center? That's a newly forming star, with a proto-planetary disk around it. But see that little blob in the upper right? That's a planet forming up there! When they do their analysis and determine its mass, it turns…
You and I have lived on planet Earth long enough to know that if you want to launch something into space, it needs to travel fast enough to escape the pull of Earth's gravity. Launch it with too slow of a speed, and it crashes back into Earth. Launch it with a little more speed, and you can send it into orbit (like a satellite). But launch it fast enough, and it can escape from Earth's gravity altogether. The speed to completely escape from Earth's gravity is pretty fast: about 11.2 km/s, or 7 miles per second! Make something denser and more massive, and you'll have to go faster and faster…